


Here Comes the Sun

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Healing Sex, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Trauma, Near Death Experiences, Surgery, The 601 Raven/Griffins Content We Deserved, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-04-24 00:09:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19161817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: "Abby feels his hands slide up the sides of her body to cup her breasts and tastes the sweetness of his breath as he moans into her mouth and she inhales that intoxicating male scent she’s missed so desperately, and she thinks maybe Robert Frost was right about Eden, but he wasn’t right about this.Nothing but sunshine, ahead of them now. Two suns’ worth, in fact. The bunker is dead and gone, they closed its door behind them and rose up into the light, the last thing out of Pandora’s Box, and it turns out nothing gold has been lost.Hope is not a fragile glass bubble of a thing, she thinks, the way the stories tell it. Hope is ferocious and resilient, as solid as the weight of Marcus’ chest beneath her hands, as indestructible as his belief in human goodness, as warm as his mouth moving desperately against hers.Hope is right here, in her arms, forever."As she waits for Marcus' organs and flesh to stitch themselves back together after his surgery, Abby realizes that she's been given the chance to heal from the inside too.





	Here Comes the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> From the Kabby Kink Meme!
> 
> PROMPT: "'Don't Scare Me Like That Again' Kabby Sex. Abby thought she lost him. She blamed herself. She thought she would never have another moment like this with him. Marcus knows the feeling. (porn with feelings???)"
> 
> LINK: https://kabbykinkmeme.livejournal.com/1042.html?thread=142866#t142866

It’s touch-and-go for a long, long time.

It’s the organ damage, not the lacerated flesh; that will heal clean. It’s the risk of a punctured liver leaking bile into his blood if her scalpel is even a millimeter off.

True, she’s steady now, she’s Doctor Griffin again, the med bay of a ship in the sky is a home she wears like a second skin, and her hands don’t tremble even a little, her body restored by a century of sleep in a way that her lover’s wasn’t.

But still.

Jackson, of course, is there, his presence a cool, soothing balm that unknits her muscles and steadies her heartbeat. She always feels more centered with Jackson at her side. A century later, a galaxy away, and Jackson is still Jackson. The rhythm into which they instantaneously fall is effortless, and Abby feels another piece of her old self clicking back into place. And if he watches her more keenly than before, scanning for telltale signs of tremor, it isn’t because she's an addict, it’s because he’s a doctor. It's so he can be her hands, if she needs him.  
  
Clarke assists too, intimately familiar with the layout of a surgery in the way only Abby Griffin's child could be. She’s fleet of foot and keenly observant; Abby has only to _think_ the word “forceps,” and they materialize. But it’s more than just stainless steel tools Clarke is placing in her mother’s hands. She is here to stand beside her, to reach into his open chest and let his blood stain her skin, so that Abby knows Marcus also belongs to Clarke. Six years of his face on her wall. Six years of stories told to Madi about the ambassador who made the first peace with the Grounders. What was any of it, but a promise of what they could be to each other when all of this was over? She never says the word "family" out loud, but Abby hears it anyway.

The fourth person in the room, against all probability, is Raven.

She has barely spoken a word to Abby since they boarded the ship – not before the long sleep, and not after. It's acutely painful, but it’s also a problem for later. Marcus’ liver, then Raven’s heart. _(Triage, Abby. Life-threatening wounds first.)_ If she stops moving for even a second to sink back into the horror of those memories, she will crumble, and she cannot crumble right now, so she locks Shallow Valley away. Even the teeth marks - permanent Vinson-shaped scars on the side of his throat, in the place he most loves to be kissed - become only shapes, devoid of meaning.

She has to take the story out of the wounds.

And it’s hard enough with Marcus, whose eyes are closed, but it’s _impossible_ with Raven.

So no one is more surprised than Abby when Raven walks into the room.

Everyone halts, fearing some kind of emergency.

"Look," she begins, a trifle defensively and apropos of nothing, "he’s hooked up to breathing equipment that’s like two centuries old. The cryopods might have put the entropy process on ice for our bodies, but it didn’t do jack for the rest of the ship. You’re the experts if something goes wrong with his organs, but I’m the one you want if something goes wrong with the machine.”

“We’ve run multiple diagnostics,” says Abby. “I appreciate the offer, Raven, I really do, but –"

“I’m not going to let him die,” Raven cuts her off brusquely. “Kane needs to live, because I have some things to say that I can't say to him if he dies, because he _left_ , and maybe if he hadn’t things would be different, so I’m pissed at him, but he still didn’t deserve this, I don’t want that for him, I don’t want that for _you,_ even though I’m still pissed at you too, by the way, I have things to say to you too, but I can't do it now because this is more important, but I want you to be okay, I _need_ you to be okay, and if he dies because something goes wrong with the ventilator while he’s under and I’m not here to fix it then you won’t be okay, not ever, and I only trust machines I’ve checked with my own hands anyway, and I haven’t checked this one, so I'm staying."

“Raven,” Abby begins hesitantly, then stops, not quite sure what to do with this somewhat extraordinary speech.

Raven scowls down at the floor, scuffling her feet like a teenager. “It’s what Monty would do,” she mumbles finally, and that's the end of the conversation, because no one can argue with that.

* * *

Time stops altogether, inside that room.

(Strange, that a hundred and twenty-five years passed in moments, while a few hours seem to take a hundred and twenty-five years.)

She doesn’t look at his face. She never looks at their faces, not while the scalpel is in her hand. You have to be able to step back, see clearly, let the problem turn into cool, emotionless science. You have to do things you know will hurt, and you can’t let compassion or affection or empathy hold you back. When she cracked open Ontari’s chest to pump her blood into Clarke, she saw nothing but the cavity, the organ, the arteries and veins. Just shapes. Just math. A problem to be solved. She could not look at the girl’s face.

But that doesn’t help, with Marcus.

Every square inch of his body is known to her. She has mapped every tendon and bone. She has touched him everywhere, kissed him everywhere. His left palm, scarred by a boiling-hot pipe, trying to get to her. The bruises on his legs which took months to heal, after she pried the rubble of a fallen building off his body with her bare hands. The inverted triangle of his oblique muscles, slowly coming into view as he undressed in front of her in Polis, the very first part of his body he showed her that night as he swallowed over and over, eyes riveted on hers, trembling hands slowly opening his zipper.

There are emotional landmines buried everywhere inside his skin.

This is why Jackson stands just a little closer to her elbow than he usually does.

Just in case.

If she falters, he will step in.

But she doesn’t falter. In some strange, indescribable way, it spurs her on. As they open his flesh to reach his organs, she thinks about the new scars she is adding to his body, the long clean pale lines they will become months from now, when his body is fully healed, and it gives her something to hold onto. The scar from this incision will fade into his skin, and she will stroke it with gentle fingers as they fall asleep, and remember this moment, when her entire world shrank down to the size of his body on her operating table. Her lips and tongue will trace this line, she thinks, as the blade slices cleanly through his belly and his body is laid bare before her with a new, brutal intimacy, the kind only a doctor can know.

She has taken Marcus Kane apart and seen the inside of him in every way but the physical, until this moment, when she touches the shuddering mass of his damaged kidneys with her own hand.

Jackson, at her side, does everything right. Clarke does everything right. Marcus is strong, and the damage is – well, the damage is very bad, but it isn’t the worst she’s ever seen, and it isn’t even the worst she’s ever repaired.

 _Hold on, love,_ she whispers to the future scar. _Just hold on._

Then the unthinkable happens.

The ventilator sputters to a halt.

Marcus is no longer breathing.

“Fuck,” exclaims Raven. “Fuck. Shit. Fuck.”

 _“Fix_ it!” snaps Clarke, panic rising in her face as she realizes Abby and Jackson, immersed in the impossibly delicate work of stitching up a lacerated organ, can’t move a millimeter without risking lethal damage.

“I’m _trying!”_

Clarke shoves her aside, pulls the ventilator off, and bends down to give Marcus mouth-to-mouth while Abby fights to keep her hands from shaking.

_Hold on. Hold on. Please, baby, just hold on._

“Mom, he’s not breathing, I don’t know what to do,” Clarke exclaims in a choked sob, as Raven pries open the base of the ventilator, grabbing a pair of forceps from a nearby tray as a makeshift pliers.

“Keep going, Clarke, you’re doing great,” says Jackson reassuringly, stepping in to protect Abby, who cannot divert her focus from the sutures she is weaving into his internal organs. “Just keep going.”

“His lungs aren’t -"

“It’s okay, it might just take a minute. Keep going. You’re doing great."

“I need something sharp, and a roll of electrical tape!” shouts Raven, on her knees with her head buried inside the machine.

“Little busy here, Raven,” says Clarke tightly, mouth sealing over Kane's again.

“Gauze and shears,” says Jackson. “The table behind you.”

“Mom,” Clarke says again, lifting her head, and Abby can hear the tears wavering in her daughter’s voice. “Mom, I don’t -"

And then it happens, the best and worst thing happening at the same time.

Marcus chokes, a horrible wet gasping sound, but he’s breathing, his lungs have started working again, he’s _alive,_ Clarke did it, they didn’t lose him.

He’s also _awake._

“No, no, no,” Clarke says desperately, as she watches consciousness followed by panicked hysteria dawn in his dark eyes, “no, Marcus, please, it’s okay, it’s okay, but you can’t move, you have to hold still, you can’t move while they’re -"

“Baby, you have to hold him still -"

“I’m _trying,_ Mom, but he’s -"

"Morphine," barks Jackson, "lower right medicine cabinet," and Clarke sprints away, but now there’s no one to hold him, as his body begins to convulse, panic rising, and _shit, shit, shit,_ he’s tearing open the sutures already, how is she ever –

"Hey, Kane," they suddenly hear Raven say, in a voice they’ve never heard before. Steady and calm, like she’s soothing a frightened child. Abby looks up to see her leaning over the operating table, her hands planted firmly on his chest, holding him in place. "Kane, you gotta breathe, okay? The ventilator shorted out, and I'm on it, and Clarke's gonna bring you some morphine so we can put you back under, so this will be over soon, but you can't move, okay? You gotta just breathe and hold still. Stay with me."

His eyes are wild and scared and it's taking Clarke forever to find a vial of morphine and Abby can hear his breath, still way too fast, but she can't stop what she's doing and she doesn't know how to calm him down.

"This is the worst fucking timing for a panic attack, man," says Raven. "Get it together."

Clarke, sprinting over with the vial in hand, is shocked and furious at her breezy tone . . . until a dry, rusty chuckle croaks out of his throat, and he gives Raven an infinitesimal nod.

Somehow, that _worked._

"You with me, Marcus?” Nod. “Can you breathe in and out for me?” _Try,_ he mouths soundlessly, and Raven smiles reassuringly. "Good. That's good. Just follow me, okay? In, out. In, out.”

And like some kind of a miracle, he actually does it.

Raven's own breath collapses out of her lungs in visceral relief, the vacuum left by a tidal wave of fear abruptly ebbing away. "You're doing great," she tells him. "I gotta fix Diyoza's crappy ventilator now, but Clarke's got you from here. Okay?" He nods. "And don't die on me, Kane," she adds, "or I swear I'll kill you."

And against all probability – the unlikeliest thing in all the world – Marcus _smiles._

“You’re doing great, Kane,” Clarke says gently, laying a comforting hand on his face as she injects the sedative in his arm. “Just keep breathing, just like that. Mom's gonna fix you up good as new, okay? We’re all right here. We all love you. You’re going to be okay.”

 _Love . . . you,_ he mouths weakly back, and then his dark lashes flutter closed.

“Fixed it,” Raven announces, rising to her feet and wiping the sweat off her brow with her sleeve. “Just had to reroute the one circuit. Should be good now. Can we put him back under?”

“Help me get the mask back on his face,” says Clarke, voice quavering a little, and together they gently lift his head to seal the clear rubber back over his mouth and nose as Raven switches the machine back on, and everyone holds still for a long moment, hearts in their throats, until they see Kane’s chest rise and fall, his breathing steady, the peaceful, even rhythm of sleep.

He’s safe. The crisis is over.

Clarke steps around the head of the table and pulls Raven into her arms.

“Stop it,” says Raven, voice muffled by the other girl’s shoulder, but she doesn’t push Clarke away. “I’m still mad, you know.”

“I know. We’ll deal with it later.”

“And I told you, these damn machines -"

“Shut up, Raven,” says Clarke, hugging her tighter. “Just for like five seconds. Please.”

“You’re making too big a deal of this,” she mumbles. “Don’t like . . . turn it into a _thing.”_

“You saved his life,” says Jackson mildly, looking up at her with warm, serious eyes that cause her to retreat into herself, pulling uncomfortably away from Clarke. “It’s already a thing.”

“I didn’t do anything, I just fixed one circuit and told him to breathe, I didn’t – like it wasn’t _heroic,_ I’m not a doctor, I didn’t _do_ anything -"

“Yes, you did,” says Abby, still not looking up, still concentrating only on the tiny sutures she now has to painstakingly unstitch and repair, still immersed in this small, confined world which is only the size of one man’s body. “He could have died.”

She can’t look at Raven right now, she cannot take her hands off her work or she will crumble, but there’s so many things unspoken in those simple words, and Raven hears them all.

She freezes, staring at Abby, eyes wide and almost fearful. “He . . . what?”

Abby doesn’t answer, so Jackson does.

“A panic attack on the operating table can kill someone,” he explains gently. “If he’d started thrashing around while the needle was still inside him, he would have ripped a gash in his own kidney that no suture would be able to repair in time. We probably would have lost him.”

“Oh,” says Raven, in a small voice, as Abby ties off the final suture, withdraws her hands from the cavity of his abdomen, and finally looks up. She meets Raven’s gaze, and holds it for a long time. “You saved his life,” she tells her. “Thank you.”

“It was nothing,” Raven mumbles, looking away.

“I think we both know,” Abby says, returning to the work of closing up the body on the table, chest still rising and falling steadily, “that that’s not true.”

Clarke puts her arm around the girl’s waist and leans her head on her shoulder. This time Raven doesn’t pull away. “You were right,” Clarke says. “Monty would be proud of you.”

* * *

If the first miracle is Raven talking Marcus down from a panic attack, and the second is that no one’s hand slipped while he was thrashing atop the hospital bed and pierced an organ, the third miracle is how long Abby manages to hold it together.

This was the hardest part of the job for her to learn, the skill which runs most contrary to her instincts. Abby is lightning in a bottle, her heart as expansive as her temper is short, and her emotions live right beneath the skin. The first time she lost a patient, she couldn’t get out of bed for three days. It was the work of years to train her mind into the kind of clinical stillness a surgeon needs. To stop _feeling_ so much for the patients lying on her table, until the job was done.

Even during the most delicate, dangerous surgeries of her life.

Even when the patient is someone she loves.

Adrenaline is a powerful drug. The human body can do extraordinary things under its influence. This is how Abby holds it together.

She holds it together as Jackson helps her to gently and carefully stitch Marcus’ abdomen back together, clean his naked body to prevent any infection at the site of the incisions, carefully insert a catheter and feeding tube, and hook him back up to the IV which will keep him safely unconscious as his body heals.

She holds it together as the four of them scrub down, tidying up the surgery and disposing of crimson-splashed gowns and masks and gloves, as she looks at her face in the washroom mirror while disinfecting her hands and realizes there is blood in her hair.

She holds it together as they carefully wheel the hospital bed out of the surgery, toward the stateroom where Abby sleeps (when she does sleep, which isn’t much) and Jackson helps her lower it to the height of her bed and remove the guardrails so that she will be able to lie down beside him.

She holds it together as Raven gives the ventilator a final check before leaving, to ensure that it will continue to hold out and keep him oxygenated for the duration of his medically-induced coma, until they can trust his organs to work on their own.

She holds it together as one by one, the others say goodbye.

(“I knew you could do it,” says Jackson, folding his long arms around her. “You always manage to find a miracle when we need one.”

“Damn right she does,” says Raven. “I’m walking, aren’t I?”)

She holds it together as her daughter buries her head in Abby’s shoulder and embraces her for a long, long time, insisting over and over that she’s happy to stay in the room with them tonight if her mother needs it, only to be gently and repeatedly rebuffed and sent back to Madi.

She holds it together until all three of them have vanished down the hall and she has closed the door behind them.

She holds it together as she unlaces her boots and lines them neatly up against the wall, pulls off her jeans and folds them over the back of a metal chair, removes her shirt and drapes it over the jeans, unfastens her bra, hooking it over the back of the chair as well, and climbs into her own bed.

She holds it together as she carefully, gently maneuvers her body so that her bare flesh is pressed against his, as she pulls a warm blanket over them both, as she rests her palm lightly over his heart, as she presses a soft kiss into the cool, antiseptic skin of his shoulder – which, she suddenly realizes, no longer smells like him, the delicious earthy animal scent of Marcus swallowed up by the chemical stench of surgical disinfectant.

Then, and only then, does Abby finally allow herself the luxury of falling apart.

She cries herself to sleep beside him that night, pulling the limp, lifeless arm that doesn’t have the IV in it around her shoulder, a pathetically desperate attempt to pretend he’s holding her, but she can’t even fool herself.

She sobs until there are no more tears left in her body, and she falls asleep there almost against her will, simply from sheer exhaustion.

* * *

It goes on like this for three weeks.

By day, she forces herself to get up from her bed, shower, dress herself, choke down some food, put her armor on, and act like Doctor Abigail Griffin again. By night, she curls up beside Marcus and cries herself to sleep with his heartbeat pulsing beneath the palm of her hand.

As time passes, as Marcus’ body heals itself from the inside out, somehow so does she. While his skin and organs and blood vessels and nerve endings and muscle tissue work around the clock to knit themselves back together, Abby’s tears somehow begin to dismantle a lifetime of walls inside her, every barrier that has ever existed between herself and Marcus, now gone.

The distance that grew between them that first few weeks in the bunker, because she had wanted to die, she had wanted the pain to be over, and Marcus refused to let her go.

The things they never said to each other about the Dark Year.

Her long, slow, nightmarish spiral into the hell of addiction.

The relief of feeling seen and understood by Vinson, only to learn that his friendship was no friendship at all.

The devastation and anger of what she felt, at the time, to be Marcus’ abandonment, which lived alongside the miserable conviction that it was no less than she deserved as punishment for what she had become.

The hope kindled by his return, brutally extinguished by violence and blood and fear, the way there wasn’t enough time to say any of the things she wanted, _needed,_ to say to him before she watched his body disappear into the frosted glass of a cryopod. The way she had typed the name “ABIGAIL GRIFFIN KANE” into the control screen of the pod next to his, before changing her mind, unsure yet whether she had earned back the right to belong to him again. The ache of waiting.

She has been waiting for him to come back to her for so long.

She wonders if he feels the same way about her.

And as the nights go by, the crumbling of the walls inside her goes back further still.

The crushing, brutal guilt she carried for so long for what she did to him under ALIE’s influence. The way he looked at her when he realized her kisses were lies. The cross. The scars on his wrists.

The shocklash. The arrest. Throwing her off the Council.

The airlock.

Jake.

She cries all of it out, her tears running in crystal rivulets down his warm golden skin, which begins slowly, day by day, to regain its comforting Marcus scent, like she can feel him coming back to life. She cries and cries until everything dark inside her is gone, like slicing open an infected wound to drain the poison out.

Every night, another painful memory is carried away inside her tears, like a boat on a river.

Every day, she feels herself grow a little stronger, a little lighter, empty space blossoming inside her chest in all the places where grief used to be.

It isn’t that she’s struggled to forgive Marcus, or that he has struggled to forgive her; they’re both kinder to each other than they are to themselves. But the scars are still there, the darkness always waiting just behind the horizon, ready to sweep in and overtake them. Happiness comes in bits and pieces only, never long enough to get used to it.

But that is over now, she has decided. They have left those other selves behind them, on Earth. This is a new world, this is a new life, and they will build a new love here, free from shadows, free from grief and pain.

So every night she cries into his shoulder, feeling the heartbeat beneath her hand grow stronger, watching the angry red scars in his flesh heal pink and clean, and every morning she wakes to two suns bathing his face with their light, and by the time he is whole again, so is she.

* * *

Twenty-four days after the surgery, an ultrasound reveals that the sutures in his organs have done their work, and the sensitive tissue is repaired; he’ll be on bed rest for another week or so, but he’s ready to take off the machines.

Jackson helps her remove the feeding tube, the catheter, the IV, the ventilator, helps her clean his naked body and move him into his real bed, and hauls the machinery away. Marcus doesn’t wake – it will take a few hours for the effect of the drugs to fade – but as she closes the door behind Jackson and turns back to look at him, he doesn’t look like a man slowly emerging from a medically-induced coma. He just looks like a man sleeping in a bed.

She climbs into the bed beside him, her bare flesh pressed against his own. His cheeks have a warm, healthy flush, and his heartbeat is strong, and this time when she curls up against his chest and pulls his limp arm around her, it almost feels real.

She cries herself to sleep again, this time with relief, pressing grateful kisses into the bare skin of his chest until exhaustion overtakes her.

She wakes a few hours later, startled by a sensation of something . . . off.

Not _wrong_ , not frightening, not setting off alarm bells in her mind, but something’s different. She doesn’t realize what it is until she tries to sit up to look at him, and realizes she can’t.

Because he’s _holding_ her.

Two strong arms are wrapped around her back, clutching her tightly to his chest, two hands warm and tender against her skin. He’s pulled her whole body closer, her legs now entangled with his, her cunt open against his upper thigh, and as she shifts to make herself more comfortable, she realizes, with a flash of a hundred different emotions at once, that his cock has begun to stir against the warm pressure of her body.

She wants to laugh and cry and kiss him, all at once.

He’s not unconscious anymore, he’s just sleeping, he awoke in the night and found her beside him and pulled her into his arms, and as she rests her chin on his chest to look at his face she can see that he fell asleep smiling.

She shifts her weight onto her hip so she can let her body settle more comfortably over his without putting pressure on his scars, and for a long time she just lets herself look at him, stroking the soft tangled hair out of his face and caressing his beard with the tips of her fingers. “I thought I’d lost you,” she whispers into the darkness, feeling tears begin to sting her eyes, and she isn’t sure whether she’s saying it to him or to the universe or to herself, but the words break something open inside her. “I’ve come so close to losing you so many times,” she murmurs, leaning down to press a soft kiss on his forehead. “I was so afraid this would be the one time I couldn’t save you.”

“I know the feeling,” he whispers back, voice hoarse and rusty from disuse, dark brown eyes fluttering open, and suddenly, there he is, right there in her arms, so warm and so real and so alive, and this time when the tears come, she can see that he’s crying too.

“You saved my life,” he whispers, reaching a hand up to cradle her face, eyes wide with something like awe. “I thought I was dying. I thought I was dead. You keep bringing me back to life. Over and over and over again. From the moment we landed on Earth. Maybe from the first moment I met you. You’ve saved me so many times, and I wanted to be able to save you, but I . . .”

His voice trails off, but she shakes her head firmly, leaning close to him, her hair a glossy satin curtain brushing lightly against his chest, set aglow by starlight from the window behind them. “You didn’t fail me, Marcus,” she tells him. “You never, ever have.”

He caresses the side of her face with gentle fingertips, like he’s memorizing her bones with his touch. “You look like _you_ again,” he whispers, voice pulsing with quiet joy, and she smiles down at him with tears in her eyes, and that’s all there is to say. They’ve turned the page. That life is gone now, and Marcus knows it too.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

“Sore,” he answers frankly, which makes her laugh.

“Good,” she says. “That’s how you know you’re alive.”

“I did wonder, for a minute there when I first woke up,” he confesses, with a wry smile. “I opened my eyes and saw the stars outside the window and thought I was back on the Ark, and then I remembered the Ark was gone, and I thought I must be dead, and I wondered if that was all the afterlife is, just living inside all our old dreams. I thought about how many nights I spent lying awake, looking out at the stars, imagining you in my arms.”

Abby looks at him sharply. “You never told me that,” she whispers. “That you . . . when we were on the Ark . . .”

“That I was in love with you?” he finishes for her gently, a sad smile in his eyes. “How could I? What would you have done differently, if I had?”

“I don’t know,” she confesses, letting her thumb gently graze his bottom lip, savoring the pleasure of being able to touch him once more, feeling greedy for him, ravenous, like she could spend the rest of her life gazing down at this face and it would still never be enough time. “But we’re here now,” she whispers. “The past is gone. We have a new world in front of us. We have a new life in front of us. And I want to share it with you.”

“Abby . . .”

“Marry me,” she says suddenly, startling them both, the words tumbling out of her mouth almost before she realizes she’s spoken them, but they’re suddenly the only true thing in the world.

Marcus stares at her, struggling to prop himself up on his elbow, to look her in the eye. He tries to say something, then stops, blinking in confusion, like he’s somehow forgotten where he is.

“Marry me,” she says again. “I want us to start a new life together. The past is behind us. My future is with you.”

“Abby, I would never,” he begins carefully, then stops. “You were married for twenty years,” he says, “and I don’t want you to think – I’ve never needed, between us, I don’t need a ring to know -"

“I know you don’t need it,” she says. “I don’t need it either. But I _want_ it.” She takes his hand in hers, lifts it to her mouth, presses a kiss against his palm. “I want to be married to you,” she tells him. “I will always love Jake. He will always be the father of my daughter. But he’s been gone for more than a century, Marcus, he’s been dead longer than he was alive. And we’ve been given the chance to start over.” She squeezes his hand in hers. “Start over with me.”

Then his hands are in her hair and he’s pulling her back down and his mouth finds hers and _oh God, oh God,_ it’s been so long, her body erupts into warm, aching heat, electricity sparking through her veins as he kisses her for the first time in a hundred and twenty-five years, he kisses her and kisses her and kisses her and when they finally pull apart, shaking, to catch their breath, the only thing he can say is _“Yes.”_

For a long time it’s just this, just warmth and sweetness and joy and relief, just warm breath and muffled sighs and hands gently caressing soft skin and tangling in silky hair, bodies remembering after a century of separation how they used to fit together, and both of them realize without speaking it aloud that it hasn’t been like this between them since Polis.

There was a poem Marcus read to her once, from a book he’d found in Cadogan’s library - back when Octavia had allowed them to have a library - written by an Old Earth poet named Robert Frost. Marcus had recognized the name on the spine of the slim little volume of verse; Frost had been Vera’s favorite.

 _“Nature’s first green is gold,_  
_Her hardest hue to hold._  
_Her early leaf’s a flower;_  
_But only so an hour._  
_Then leaf subsides to leaf._  
_So Eden sank to grief,_  
_So dawn goes down to day._  
_Nothing gold can stay.”_

The last words of the poem stuck in Abby's mind, somehow, even before she’d begun to fully understand them. They rolled around and around in her mind, like a dark prophesy, like a horrible warning.

_“Nothing gold can stay.”_

It hadn’t been all bad, down there in the bunker, especially not at the beginning; there had been moments of real joy. There had been laughter and sex and music and friendship. There had been Unity Day gatherings and storytelling nights, there had been farm-fresh summer fruit and long nights of easy conversation – with Indra, with Jackson, with Niylah, even sometimes with Octavia. There had been nights when she and Marcus had curled up together in their tiny metal bunk at the end of a long day with smiles on their faces.

But nothing gold could stay.

There was always something. They could never rest in each other for long. Nothing bright or hopeful could last inside those grim, airless, blood-smeared walls. Not even between two people who loved each other this much, who had fought so hard to find their way back to each other. Even in those first few months, after they’d reconciled, dizzy with relief to find the distance between them finally closed again, hungry for each other after such a long absence – still, there was so much darkness to counterbalance their joy. There was Thelonious to bury, first. There was Octavia, still struggling to find her footing. There was the shadow of Kara Cooper’s rebellion hanging over everything and making them both uneasy. Even before the Dark Year, even before Abby’s addiction had become truly unmanageable, even before Kane first set foot in the fighting pit . . . nothing gold could stay.

Not down there.

In Polis they’d carved out a small island of peace and love and delight, amidst the nightmare of the world ending. It had only lasted nine days, but it was the happiest nine days either of them could remember, and they held onto its memory like a shimmering lifeline, during those days they felt lost in the dark.

Abby feels his hands slide up the sides of her body to cup her breasts and tastes the sweetness of his breath as he moans into her mouth and she inhales that intoxicating male scent she’s missed so desperately, and she thinks maybe Robert Frost was right about Eden, but he wasn’t right about this.

Nothing but sunshine, ahead of them now. Two suns’ worth, in fact. The bunker is dead and gone, they closed its door behind them and rose up into the light, the last thing out of Pandora’s Box, and it turns out nothing gold has been lost.

Hope is not a fragile glass bubble of a thing, she thinks, the way the stories tell it. Hope is ferocious and resilient, as solid as the weight of Marcus’ chest beneath her hands, as indestructible as his belief in human goodness, as warm as his mouth moving desperately against hers.

Hope is right here, in her arms, forever.

When she shifts her weight to press her cunt more firmly against his thigh, aching for relief, for friction, for pressure, she feels him inhale sharply, his tongue licking hot and hard into her mouth, his hands growing more urgent as they tangle in her hair.

“Abby,” he whispers, pulling away, gazing up at her, eyes black with desire. “It’s been so long, I feel . . .”

“I know.”

“I never stopped wanting you,” he says in a low voice. “When I left, it wasn’t . . . I know that you know, but I need to say it. It was never that I loved you less, or wanted you less. There was never a single moment where I –"

“Shhhh,” she murmurs, resting her fingers over his lips. “Marcus, it’s okay. I know. All of that’s over now.”

He takes her hand in his and kisses it. “From the moment we set foot on earth,” he tells her, “every night that I wasn’t with you, I was thinking about being with you. It took a long time for me to let myself admit it, but it was always there. Always.”

She raises an eyebrow, grinning impishly down at him. “Always?” she repeats skeptically. “Even when you were yelling at me?”

 _“Especially_ when I was yelling at you,” he retorts in a low growl, yanking her back down for a kiss so rough it makes her gasp. As payback, she lets one hand slide down his body and over his thighs until she finds the warm weight of his cock, and glides a loose fist up and down the delicate flesh of the shaft until he arches his back off the mattress and gives a bone-deep shudder of pleasure.

“No one’s touched me there in a hundred and twenty-five years,” he murmurs, breath coming harsh and fast as her grip tightens slightly. “Thank God it still works.”

“Well, I hear you had a very good doctor,” she quips, letting her thumb gently caress the flared head, circling the tiny slit in the tip to tease out the first few drops of precum, smiling as she watches a warm pink flush sweep over his skin.

“The best,” he says breathlessly. “A little cocky, maybe – ouch!” he exclaims, as she removes her hand to give him a gentle poke right in the most sensitive part of his new scar.

“Serves you right.”

“Listen,” he says, struggling a little to sit up. “I know how close I came, Abby. You don’t have to tell me. You wouldn’t have needed all three of them with you in surgery if it wasn’t serious. I don’t want to risk doing anything that would jeopardize your hard work.”

“But?” she prods him, amused enough to force him to say it out loud.

“But I swear to God, Abby, I’ve never wanted to throw you down onto a mattress and have my way with you this badly, so I need to know how long I have to wait.”

“Your vitals are very good,” she says primly, letting herself slip into the crisp, formal doctor’s voice that turns him on so much; sure enough, she feels his cock begin to twitch desperately in her hand. “Your organ tissue is healed, the sutures held nicely, so there’s no lasting internal damage, just the surgical scars which will take another week or so to heal completely. You can get up and walk around a little bit tomorrow, you can eat and bathe and stretch your legs, but you still have another six days of bed rest, at least.”

“Give me the prognosis, Doctor Griffin.”

“If you lie on your back, and don’t put any weight on the site of the incisions, then yes, you can have sex,” she tells him. “As long as it’s under proper medical supervision.”

“Fine,” he says, “I’ll call Jackson,” then laughs as she reaches for the pillow to smack him on the head.

“It’s very fortunate for you that your future wife is a doctor,” she murmurs, leaning down to kiss him, fingertips dancing lightly up the shaft of his cock, tracing the veins until he shivers.

“Very fortunate indeed,” he whispers hoarsely. “I’m honestly not sure I could wait six more days.”

“You don’t have to,” she tells him, rising up onto her knees to straddle his hips very, very gently. “I’m right here.”

"Thank God."

“You’re going to have to hold still,” she warns him, as her thighs lower on either side of his.

“I know.”

“I mean it. Your skin is still healing. You have to move as little as possible.”

“Oh dear,” he says dryly, folding his arms behind his head, “you mean I have to just lie back on these surprisingly decent pillows and do nothing, while the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life gets on top of me and does all the work? However shall I endure it?”

“I see the stupid jokes have returned, I’ll make sure to note it on your medical chart.”

“I almost _died,”_ he reminds her pointedly, “you should be nicer to me.”

She waves this off dismissively. “Don’t be so dramatic. I had the whole thing under control.”

“Your bedside manner could use some work, Doctor Griffin,” he observes dryly, raising an eyebrow and earning himself a poke in the ribs.

“Do you want to have sex or not?”

“I want to have sex,” he says hastily. “I just want to annoy you a little bit first.”

She heaves a sigh, giving his cheek a light smack. “Why are you like this?”

“Because it turns me on when you’re in this mood,” he says, eyes flashing with mischief.

“You are _impossible,”_ she tells him sternly, repressing a laugh, and he shrugs, but doesn’t deny it. _“Fine,”_ she huffs irritably, rising up onto her knees and planting her palms on his chest. “Even though you have not actually _earned_ this.”

“I promise to be suitably grateful,” he assures her, “as soon as my doctor clears me to play a more . . . _active_ role.”

“I will be keeping score.”

“I would expect no less of you,” he says, but whatever other retort might have been forming on his lips fades away as her hips sink down onto his and slowly, slowly, slowly, his cock stretches her open, filling her completely, and then with one long ragged exhale, they’re home.

It’s so good she wants to _cry,_ her whole body opening up to let him in as she sinks down onto his cock and feels the sweet, blissful pressure of being full for the first time in much too long.

“Marcus,” she whispers, leaning forward to take him deeper, one palm braced on his chest while she reaches out a hand to caress his face. “Oh God, I missed you.”

“I missed you so much,” he murmurs back, one hand lifting to cover hers where it rests over his pounding heart. “Every moment that you’re not in my arms, I miss you.”

They stay like that for a long, long time, eyes fixed on each other, hands joined over Marcus’ heart as Abby brushes his face with gentle fingertips, her hips moving deep and slow against his. She’s careful, restrained, she can’t go as hard as they usually do when they come back together after a long absence. So often their reunions are wild, urgent, desperate, frequently up against the wall, hands yanking clumsily at zippers and seizing fistfuls of hair, mouths crashing into each other, bodies colliding with enough force to cause bruises the next day. And she likes it that way (there’s no way she _doesn’t_ like it with Marcus), but tonight the slow, hypnotic rhythm is for her as much as it is for him. She wants to draw this out, she wants to stay here in this moment with him as long as she can, holding him so deep that she imagines she can feel him inside her lungs and heart.

“Abby,” he breathes over and over, like it’s the only word he can say. “Abby. Abby. Abby.”

And finally she surrenders to the tears stinging her eyes, lets them fall down her cheeks, because she can see he’s crying too, his warm brown eyes are glowing up at her with incandescent joy and he can’t hold it in any longer. His hand wraps around hers, holding it tightly, pressed against the beat of his heart, as her fingers brush the tears from his face. “Abby,” he says again.

“Marcus.”

She can feel his cock begin to pulse and tremble inside her, she can feel the currents that run through it beginning to come to life, making him ready. She slows her movements a little, drawing it out. Marcus always likes to watch her come first, likes to hungrily drink in in the sights and sounds and sensations of her orgasms, likes to let her pleasure shudder through him before he takes his own. She sits back onto her heels, lets go of his face and his hand, and slides one hand down to rub her own clit.

“Oh God,” he groans desperately. “Yes. Please. Yes.”

“Do you want to watch me make myself come?”

“Please,” he begs her, voice hoarse, “please.”

With her left hand, she begins to trace delicate little circles around the areola of her left breast, petting it lightly until the rosy skin begins to pebble, then rubbing the nipple between her thumb and forefinger, the way Marcus loves to do. She doesn’t tear her eyes off him. His gaze is riveted on her body, and he swallows hard, over and over again. With her right hand, she parts her inner labia with her index and ring fingers to give him a perfect view of her swollen little clit, then rubs it gently with her middle finger, so he can see everything while she touches herself.

Marcus can’t speak. His cheeks are flushed, his eyes dark and wild, his body beginning to glow with perspiration, as she slowly rides his cock and holds herself open to his gaze as she touches herself with one delicate finger. She’s torturously slow, shivers running up and down her own spine, teasing herself until her whole body is heaving with deep, ragged breaths, until the heat inside her rises to such a fever pitch that the delicate silken touches aren’t enough, until she’s pinching her own nipple and roughly kneading her own breast hard enough to turn the flesh white, until her fingers are rubbing frantic circles around her clit, rising and falling over and over again on his cock, until finally the orgasm breaks over her and she comes and comes, brokenly panting his name.

Her cunt floods with warmth and wetness, allowing her to take his thick, aching length even deeper inside her, until finally she’s seated completely, her cunt pressed warm and wet against his skin. Marcus groans, a low keening animal sound that makes her smile; it will never stop astonishing her, the way this man she once thought was so stiff and cold and rigid can lose control and unravel completely whenever he’s inside her. This is the Marcus nobody sees but Abby, the Marcus who only exists in bed, who comes to life as the pressure of orgasm builds and builds inside his body. He’s fearless, uninhibited, somehow grateful and greedy and generous all at the same time, and she hasn’t seen this Marcus in so long that a part of her had nearly begun to give up.

“I can feel how close you are,” she whispers, reaching down between her thighs to trace light, teasing fingertips over the throbbing, pulsing mounds now nestled snugly against her cunt, rocking gently and letting the muscles of her inner walls contract in an intimate embrace. He begins to tremble uncontrollably as she rolls her hips, riding him hard and deep and slow, her cunt clutching fiercely at him, and she smiles as she watches his hands reach out to grip the sheets so hard his knuckles turn white.

“God, Abby, it’s been so long,” he pants, “I’m so, you’re so, it’s . . .”

“Hush, baby,” she whispers, which makes him soften obediently and close his eyes, melting back into the cushions. (He’s always liked “baby.”) “Just breathe with me. Just let it all go. Let me take all of it.”

“Abby . . . oh God, Abby . . .”

“I’m right here, love, just let go. Give all of yourself to me.”

And so he does.

He comes inside her with a deep, desperate groan, the sounds he makes so raw and loud that the stiff, cold Marcus Kane of the Ark would be mortified. But this one doesn’t care. The Marcus Kane who is fearless in bed with her moans her name over and over again, chest heaving with gasping breaths, and when he’s finally filled her completely he reaches his arms out to her like a child pleading to be held. She sinks down against his body, letting him cradle her small, soft body against his, as their breath and heartbeat slow to the same quiet, drowsy pace.

“Every time I think I can’t fall more in love with you,” he begins, then trails off, unable to speak any more, just pressing a soft kiss into the top of her head.

“Me too,” she whispers. “Me too.”

They lie there together, in warm, drowsy stillness, sated and silent and content, but they don’t sleep. They just breathe each other in, sending silent prayers of gratitude out to whoever in the universe is listening, until finally, the light outside the window begins to change, and the two suns rise for the very first time on Marcus Kane’s awestruck, wondering face.


End file.
